Two innovative books published in the 1970s used fragmentation and discontinuity to create kaleidoscopic portraits of their heroines’ lives. Renata Adler’s “Speedboat,” narrated by a woman who worked at a tabloid newspaper, jump-cut among vignettes from her life to capture the incongruities of her experience and the larger incongruities of American life in the ’60s and ’70s. Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights,” whose narrator bore more than a passing resemblance to the author, mapped the contours of her life by putting memories, aphorisms and observations on shuffle.
Jenny Offill’s new novel, “Dept. of Speculation,” owes a huge debt to these two pioneering novels, and to their classic precursor, “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Rilke’s 1910 novel, which was structured as a kind of journal. Ms. Offill’s unnamed heroine — who sometimes addresses the reader in the first person, and sometimes is referred to as “the wife” — has a lot in common with the narrators of “Speedboat” and “Sleepness Nights”: She is observant and literary minded, given to seeing the odd connections (or lack of connections) among the things that make up her day-to-day life and the more subterranean thoughts that jitter around in her head. She also has a lot in common with Joan Didion’s heroines: She is prone to anxiety, dread and the feeling that “a car alarm was perpetually going off in my head.”
She likes to collect odd, portentous anecdotes, like a study about sleep deprivation driving cats crazy and memories of a cat who kept her up at night, crunching on the bones of mice. What she likes about yoga, she says, is “the part at the end when the teacher covered you with a blanket and you got to pretend you were dead for 10 minutes.” When she has a persistent cough, she thinks she might have contracted tuberculosis: “ ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water,’ I thought pleasingly.”
At the beginning of this carefully carpentered novel, such pronouncements can make the narrator (i.e., the wife) seem like a cartoon of a high-strung, intellectually pretentious, narcissistic woman — at least this is how her self-presentation comes off. Her constant quoting of writers and thinkers like Simone Weil, Hesiod, Keats, Stefan Zweig and Wittgenstein feels like the hectic name-dropping tweets of an eager-to-impress literary student, and her proclivity for dwelling on the negative can’t help but summon memories of Debbie Downer on “Saturday Night Live.”
Such behavior makes it hard to understand exactly why her nice, earnest husband married her and how he puts up with her willfully self-conscious observations (“I found a book called ‘Thriving Not Surviving’ in a box on the street. I stood there, flipping through it, unwilling to commit.”) and tireless self-pity (she compares her sleepless nights as a new mother and tortured artist to those of a “prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark”).
We learn that the wife had planned to become “an art monster” — she is a writer — and never marry; for years, she says, she “kept a Post-it note above my desk, WORK NOT LOVE!” She will later tell a friend it was “a miracle” that she found her husband, and had so many happy years together. That is later, after her discovery that her “famously kind” husband has betrayed her in the most banal and predictable way — taking up with a younger woman.
Ms. Offill carefully modulates her portrait of the wife, by shifting between the first person and the third, and between the present tense and the past. And as the book progresses, our sympathy for the wife grows, as we begin to see just how deeply her husband’s affair has hurt her and recolored all her dreams and assumptions. The second portion of the novel — which relies on the third person — is funnier than the first half: more reminiscent of Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn,” say, than Ms. Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.” At the same time, it gradually builds into a genuinely moving story of love lost and perhaps, provisionally, recovered.
Writing in short, staccato takes, Ms. Offill gives us strobe-lit glimpses of the world that the wife and her husband and their daughter inhabit — Brooklyn, where bedbug infested mattresses litter the street, but where babysitters also cost $200 a night and many of the young and not-so-young mothers diligently practice yoga. Ms. Offill’s efforts to balance the generic (the wife, the husband) with specifics are sometimes awkward: The husband, who has a radio show and records “soundscapes of the city” remains a sketchy fellow, and for all her particular complaints and woes; the wife, too, can sometimes seem more like a spindly representative figure than an individual. It is the couple’s young daughter who emerges as the novel’s most fully rendered character: solemn, impertinent, curious, at that age when happiness can be found in making paper valentines with rubber cement, or a cake shaped like a flower or a horse.
Ms. Offill writes about this child with the same intuitive understanding she brought to the child heroine of her haunting first novel, “Last Things.” In that earlier book, the child was a prism through which we came to know her fractured family. In “Dept. of Speculation,” the child is the cement in the relationship between the wife and the husband. She’s also the collateral damage and the reason they seem to contemplate giving their dented marriage a second act.
DEPT. OF SPECULATION
By Jenny Offill
177 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $22.95.